There may be snow covering the ground in Boston, and rain falling from the heavens Noah-style, but it can do nothing to dampen the almost ethereal glow of those who’ve been seen wandering around the streets, muttering to themselves and counting down in some arcane fashion.
Ah, diehard Red Sox fans.
Pitchers and catchers report tomorrow for spring training, so perhaps it’s time to revisit the situation when it comes to watching baseball games online. If you remember, two years ago, we reported that the Major League Baseball’s streaming client had virtually no real Mac support, thanks to forcing them to use the then sub-par Microsoft streaming player.
MLB has now apparently seen the light—and it’s silver. Microsoft’s new Flash-competitor, Silverlight, which is due to power Netflix’s Mac-compatible streaming features later this year, is the new underpinning of the MLB’s online offerings.
Granted, you’ll still have to pay MLB for the privilege of watching games online, but at least now Mac users won’t be throwing that money into a giant empty pit.
The only reason I have cable TV is to get NESN to watch the Red Sox. If I could get all of the Red Sox games for $120/yr I would do it in a heartbeat. But the blackout restrictions make the MLB packages uninteresting.
I'll just note that I'm having nothing to do with Silverlight until Microsoft at least delivers tools to enable Mac developers to create content. At this time I see Silverlight as competition to Flash and, despite Flash's drawbacks, at least Adobe delivers tools at a Mac user can use to create stuff. If Silverlight has its way then we'll have to use ruddy Windows to create anything and then Microsoft will probably kill development of the Mac plug-in as well. Been there, done that, not going to encourage it again.
I don't get this post. Last year, I was able to watch multiple games at a time, all in separate Quicktime windows, and save the wmv files if I so chose for later editing, burning to DVD, et cetera.
Silverlight will prevent me from doing any of those things this season. We shouldn't be lauding this change, we should be cursing it!
"I'll just note that I'm having nothing to do with Silverlight until Microsoft at least delivers tools to enable Mac developers to create content."
This is why Silverlight really isn't going anywhere. MSFT will pay big bucks to get some content-provider suckers to sign on, but MSFT fails to realize that most web dev is done on Macs. I have no great love for Flash, but Silverlight is a deeply flawed step BACKWARDS.